IBM Corp and Larkspur, California-based AS/400 house Synon Corp have formed an Object Technology Lab in AS/400’s Rochester, Minnesota headquarters and will use Synon’s object-oriented Obsydian development environment to help users build new AS/400 client/server applications and convert old ones. The Lab will create native AS/400 Obsydian object classes for imaging, telephony, multimedia, Internet, data warehousing and Lotus Notes. Synon will make the objects available to Obsydian developers, the first of which will ship by year-end. Synon recently shifted Obsydian on to NT but has yet to release long- overdue Unix versions. AS/400’s already home to IBM’s San Francisco (Shareable Frameworks) cross-platform, client/server object-based application development environment effort. IBM has also has the Taligent Object Technology Center in Cupertino, California.
